Baby Markets Is Here!

Baby Markets: Money and the New Politics of Creating Families, edited by Michele Bratcher Goodwin (University of Minnesota), is available from Cambridge University Press.  Contributors include: Michele Goodwin, Martha Ertman, Kimberly Krawiec, Mary Anne Case, Sara Dorow, Ruth Arlene-Howe, Elizabeth Bartholet, Jose Gabilondo, Mary Eschelbach Hansen, Daniel Pollack, Naomi Cahn, Maggie Gallagher, Debora Spar, John Robertson, June Carbone, Nanette Elster, Lisa Ikemota, Michelle Oberman, Viviana Zelizer, Sonia Suter

And my chapter, Price And Pretense In The Baby Market, is available on SSRN.  Abstract:     

Throughout the world, baby selling is formally prohibited. And throughout the world babies are bought and sold each day. As demonstrated in this Essay, the legal baby trade is a global market in which prospective parents pay, scores of intermediaries profit, and the demand for children is clearly differentiated by age, race, special needs, and other consumer preferences, with prices ranging from zero to over one hundred thousand dollars. Yet legal regimes and policymakers around the world pretend that the baby market does not exist, most notably through prohibitions against baby selling - typically defined as a prohibition against the relinquishment of parental rights in exchange for compensation.

This Essay explores the costs of societal pretense that legal baby markets do not exist. Those costs include scarcity, foregone opportunities to address market failures, an inability to develop regulations designed to further particular public policies unlikely to be advanced solely through the goal of profit-maximization, and the promotion of rent-seeking. This Essay focuses specifically on the rent-seeking problem, arguing that, although frequently defended by those who contend that commercial markets in parental rights commodify human beings, compromise individual dignity, or jeopardize fundamental values, bans against baby selling (at least as currently written and enforced) serve little purpose other than enabling anti-competitive behavior by the most economically and politically powerful baby market participants.

Comments

[Alfred]

Congratulations, Kim -- and Michele. This is extremely exciting. I saw that CUP had a very nice full-page, color ad in NYROB back in the February 25 issue. It featured Baby Markets.

[Kim Krawiec]

Thanks Al! Missed the ad, but happy to see the books been getting some publicity -- Michele put together a good group of authors for this one.

[Kim킴]

Just ordered this book! I'm very much looking forward to reading it!